Religiosity,Economics and Life Satisfaction

This paper uses a large individual data set from the Euro Barometer Survey (ICPSR 1993 Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Economic Research (ICPSR) 1993 Euro-Barometer Surveys Ann Arbor: University of Michigan  ) to estimate the influence of religious phenomena on self-perceived satisfaction of an individual, controlling for macroeconomic conditions, effects of his political stance, and other socio-economic variables. Our estimated ordered logit model results show that an individual's life satisfaction is positively related to measures of strong religious attachment in the sense of being willing to commit to attending religious services frequently. Our other findings include that no strong evidence exists for the hypothesis that leftists suffer more from income inequality.